When handling events or documents with computers, collaboration between computers is frequently concerned to process an object or document together. Usually, there is a need to invoke or call for remote service. When collaboration relates to an object, prior art will treat an object as plain text, or invoke the object and all of its content to process. Treating an object as plain text to process will lost the status and content of the object. Furthermore, corresponding remote service might be closed or canceled. This will make the process useless. Invoking the object and all of its information including content will cause the process system very slow when there are huge amount of information data. However, the information required might only be part of object information, e.g. part of the object content.
For example, many documents related with collaboration comprise people names. These people names will be treated as normal text to be processed by existing edit tools. In some integrated environment, some tools or applications, e.g. email, chat tools or calendar tools can support on-line collaboration. Some tools or applications do not support on-line collaboration. Many times, there is no need for user to be on-line all the time. Therefore, there is a need that all office software (tools or applications) could directly invoke name object in documents. This will facilitate the collaboration.
Similar to people names, there are many other type of objects in the existing system environment, e.g. address, date, company names and events, etc. Many documents or applications will refer to these objects. Being aware of the status or content of these objects by the documents or applications, will greatly facilitate the collaboration between them.
Furthermore, although many existing applications could handle objects, their processing capability is usually limited to one or several particular types of object. For example, Instant Messaging (IM) could process people names as objects, obtain the status of these people in real time, and allow conversation among several people. Calendar tool could schedule the information of a person and arrange a meeting.
The collaboration between different tools will require the status of concerned objects. For example, email tools will need the status information of the receiving email box. Ignoring such information might cause mail delivery failure. Moreover, not knowing the link status of an URL might cause operation failure related with the URL.
In prior art, if an application requires the information in a remote service, special programming might be required. For example, conversation with Instant Messaging will require communication with IM service to know whether the counter part is on-line.
If an object is cited in a tool, and the tool could not communicate with corresponding remote service for the object, then the tool could only treat the object as a text string. If other tools need to collaborate with the object, user must input related information.
In order to solve the problem in collaboration on same objects, Microsoft Corporation provides a technique with Smart Tag and Smart Document. Wherein, object links are identified with word match. The links could only be used to invoke corresponding tools defined by programming for processing. However, special programming for every tool is required to identify links in a particular context and invoke other tools to handle the links properly. When the number of tools for collaboration increases, the programming work becomes heavy and cause low efficiency.
The patent application US20030225789 suggests applications transform objects between each other, and uses metadata stored in repository for conversion. The application has to ‘know’ each other to transfer the objects to a particular application. If the object is a link to a remote object, the metadata of the object has to be got from remote service by the application. Like other current solutions, the object/link is most likely to be treated as text string unless the application is programmed for remote service access.